Like the person with a hammer who thinks every problem is a nail, John Harris can be relied upon to insist that the chief cure for Britain's democratic shortcomings is localism. This has meant both advocating a radical devolution of powers to the neighbourhood level ("flatpack democracy") and championing metropolitan mayors against Whitehall. As he tends to take a blinkered approach to each (in the manner of his Anywhere but Westminster safaris), he never has to address the contradictions between the two, nor has he produced a theory of subsidiarity that would distinguish between good (regional) and bad (national) centralisation. While he is fulsome in his praise of technocratic Blairites, like Nick Forbes in Newcastle, he also exhibits a suspicion of politicians who are too political, hence his admiration for middle-class independents and his distrust of "top-down" Corbynism. His is a pessimistic anti-politics, hence the apocalyptic tone of his latest bulletin where he insists "that power and responsibility have to be radically relocated, before our age of failure and rupture finally breaks the system for good".
Harris provides a dubious history for this narrative of impending doom: "The very British malaise this story highlights (which is most clearly manifested in England, although all four countries of the UK now have over-powerful administrative centres, and weak local government) goes back more than a century, to a diminishing of civic leadership by national government that began in the early 1900s, and reached a peak in the Thatcher era, with a sustained assault on city and local government, and the idiotic abolition of England’s metropolitan county councils." He provides no explanation for why this process should have started in the Edwardian era, though the online version of his article links to a History Today essay bemoaning the 1902 Education Act for removing "direct democratic control" over schools. There is an argument to be made that the slightly wider franchise for local as opposed to parliamentary elections (e.g. some women had the vote) made councils more democratic at the time, but after 1900 the trend was towards universal adult suffrage at both local and national levels. The era of civic leadership whose passing Harris regrets was marked by the limited democracy of property ownership.
The Balfour Act, as the 1902 legislation was known, wasn't a power-grab by Whitehall. Its main provision was to guarantee funds from local rates for denominational schools that could operate independently of council control. This was undoubtedly regressive, as it entrenched religious schools and selective grammars, but if anything it meant devolving power, not centralising it. The act also replaced the directly-elected school boards with council-appointed local education authorities (LEAs). This "deradicalised" education, as many of the school boards had attracted trade unionist and suffragette candidates, but again the move hardly amounted to centralisation, while the later 1944 Education Act (the Butler Act) would extend local authority control over denominational schools. The major move towards centralisation in education came with the 1988 Education Reform Act (the Baker Act), which introduced the national curriculum, standarised testing and grant-maintained schools.
Harris's wider claim of "a diminishing of civic leadership by national government" over the course of the last century isn't supported by the actual history. The power of local authorities steadily expanded after 1900, not only in traditional areas such as public health and housing but increasingly in newer areas such as transport, further education and arts and culture. This culminated in the 1972 Local Government Act, which established the metropolitan county councils in recognition of the need for unitary control in the major conurbations. The tide turned with the Thatcher government, which not only abolished the metropolitan counties and reduced local authority influence over education but also commenced the privatisation of many local services. But this was very much a handbrake-turn, not the peak of an 80-year long centralisation drive. It must also be remembered that Thatcher's justification for many of these policies was to return power to local communities, not only in abolishing the metropolitan counties to the advantage of the boroughs but in curtailing "irresponsible" spending on black lesbians and other lefty causes for the benefit of respectable ratepayers. In this she was evoking the same Edwardian nostalgia that enamours the Guardian's small town expert.
In further support of his argument, Harris attributes the lower Covid-19 death rate in Germany to its tradition of devolution. This isn't without substance - it's clear that the UK government's decision to largely bypass local health experts has been a disaster - but a blithe comparison with German federalism ignores the long history of fragmentation under the Holy Roman Empire and the compromises required to effect unification in the nineteenth century, not to mention the reaction against centralisation after 1945. In contrast, England has been a unitary and highly-centralised state since 1066. Its devolution of power (or outright ceding of sovereignty) over the last century was limited to those parts of the British Isles that had been unwillingly absorbed in the past. England itself remains a relatively homogenous country with little appetite for the sort of regionalism found in Germany, Italy and Spain, and one where a strong civic identity in the major cities (as distinct from small towns) has traditionally been contentious and viewed with suspicion across much of the political spectrum (hence the Labour establishment's ambivalence over the GLC and its current uncertainty over devolution).
The weak power of the contemporary metro mayors, such as Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham, is consistent with British history, and the 1972-86 period of powerful metropolitan councils is very much the exception. It is county councils and city boroughs that have traditionally been the centres of local power, and they have been reluctant to devolve authority further as much as they have been reluctant to support regional tiers, not least because they have seen their remits eroded by Whitehall since the 1980s. It is possible that the metro mayors could evolve into a more substantial layer of government, but that could only come about if central government chooses to both loosen its own grip and dragoon the counties and boroughs into line. This seems unlikely in the current climate. The liberal ideal of a plurality of powers keeping each other in check, like the idea that local independents are inherently virtuous, is essentially anti-political. The reality at the micro-level is a monopolisation of scarce resources by the sharp-elbowed middle classes, NIMBYism and a conceptual segregation of local from national (and international) politics.
The metropolitan counties were created in response to the new demands of the 1960s and 70s, particularly the need for better coordination of housing and transport, as well as the first stages of deindustrialisation. Their abolition necessitated the creation of various coordinating bodies that have gradually led to the revival of unitary authorites since the millennium. This has been amplified by the increasing importance in the neoliberal era of agglomeration, requiring strategic coordination of transport, the environment and planning. The radicalisation that the older authorities were prone to has been neutered by directly-elected mayors beholden to media approval and with tight constraints on their remit (Ken Livingstone being the only notable maverick). The current friction between the Labour metro mayors and Tory government is likely to make the latter more reluctant to cede further authority, while the former are unlikely to agitate in any serious way as that would run counter to the strategy of the national party at Westminster and risk creating alternative centres of authority to Keir Starmer.
We are likely to remain stuck with a highly-centralised national government, a patchwork of county and borough councils that are either blinkered or beleaguered, and an inadequate intermediate layer at the metropolitan and regional level whose powers are inferior to popular expectations (not a day goes by without the Mayor of London being condemned for not acting over some issue that the office has absolutely no power over). It is important to recognise the competing dynamics: that national parties will always want a strong state in order to enact national policies and won't welcome dissenting intra-party power bases; that metropolitan authorities span varied constituencies with different interests, which means a politics of struggle rather than cooperation is inevitable; and that effective regional authorities capable of "levelling-up" must necessarily trample over the interests of some small towns and districts for the wider good. Until he acknowledges these dynamics, Harris's insistence that localism is a pancea for effective local government will remain just the idle daydream of the Shire-folk.
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